Land Memory Reconstruction And Justice

Land is a significant and controversial topic in South Africa. Addressing the land claims of those dispossessed in the past has proved to be a demanding, multidimensional process. In many respects the land restitution program that was launched as part of the county’s transition to democracy in 1994 has failed to meet expectations, with ordinary citizens, policymakers, and analysts questioning not only its progress but also its outcomes and parameters. Land, Memory, Reconstruction, and Justice brings together a wealth of topical material and case studies by leading experts in the field who present a rich mix of perspectives from politics, sociology, geography, social anthropology, law, history, and agricultural economics. The collection addresses both the material and the symbolic dimensions of land claims, in rural and urban contexts, and explores the complex intersection of issues confronting the restitution program, from the promotion of livelihoods to questions of rights, identity, and transitional justice. A valuable contribution to the field of land and agrarian studies, both in South Africa and internationally, it is undoubtedly the most comprehensive treatment to date of South Africa’s postapartheid land claims process and will be essential reading for scholars and students of land reform for years to come.

In South Africa land is one of the most significant and controversial topics. Land restitution has been a complex, multidimensional process that has failed to meet the expectations with which it was initially launched in 1994. Land, Memory, Reconstruction, and Justice brings together a wealth of topical material and case studies by leading experts in the field who present a rich mix of perspectives from politics, sociology, geography, social anthropology, law, history, and agricultural economics. The collection addresses both the material and the symbolic dimensions of land claims, in rural and urban contexts, and explores the complex intersection of issues confronting the restitution program, from the promotion of livelihoods to questions of rights, identity, and transitional justice.

This book investigates the judgements South Africans make about the fairness of their country's past, focusing on historical land dispossessions.

Gender Justice and Legal Pluralities: Latin American and African Perspectives examines the relationship between legal pluralities and the prospects for greater gender justice in developing countries. Rather than asking whether legal pluralities are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for women, the starting point of this volume is that legal pluralities are a social fact. Adopting a more anthropological approach to the issues of gender justice and women’s rights, it analyzes how gendered rights claims are made and responded to within a range of different cultural, social, economic and political contexts. By examining the different ways in which legal norms, instruments and discourses are being used to challenge or reinforce gendered forms of exclusion, contributing authors generate new knowledge about the dynamics at play between the contemporary contexts of legal pluralities and the struggles for gender justice. Any consideration of this relationship must, it is concluded, be located within a broader, historically informed analysis of regimes of governance.

This local history of Griqua Philippolis (1824-1862) and Afrikaner Orania (1990-2013) gets at the crux of the ever-pertinent land question in South Africa. Identifying the many layers of dispossession definitive of the South African past, the book presents a provocative new argument about land rights and the residues of settler colonialism.

​​​​This book examines the role of economic violence (violations of economic and social rights, corruption, and plunder of natural resources) within the transitional justice agenda. Because economic violence often leads to conflict, is perpetrated during conflict, and continues afterwards as a legacy of conflict, a greater focus on economic and social rights issues in the transitional justice context is critical. One might add that insofar as transitional justice is increasingly seen as an instrument of peacebuilding rather than a simple political transition, focus on economic violence as the crucial “root cause” is key to preventing re-lapse into conflict. Recent increasing attention to economic issues by academics and truth commissions suggest this may be slowly changing, and that economic and social rights may represent the “next frontier” of transitional justice concerns. There remain difficult questions that have yet to be worked out at the level of theory, policy, and practice. Further scholarship in this regard is both timely, and necessary. This volume therefore presents an opportunity to fill an important gap. The project will bring together new papers by recognized and emerging scholars and policy experts in the field.​

The year 2008 is the deadline set by President Mbeki for the finalization of all land claims by people who were dispossessed under the apartheid and previous white governments. Although most experts agree this is an impossible deadline, it does provide a significant political moment for reflection on the ANC government's program of land restitution since the end of apartheid. Land reform (and land restitution within that) remains a highly charged issue in South Africa, one that deserves more in-depth analysis. Drawing on her experience as Rural Land Claims Commissioner in KwaZulu-Natal from 1995 to 2000, Professor Cherryl Walker provides a multilayered account of land reform in South Africa, one that covers general critical commentary, detailed case material, and personal narrative. She explores the master narrative of loss and restoration, which has been fundamental in shaping the restitution program; offers a critical overview of the achievements of the program as a whole; and discusses what she calls the "non-programmatic limits to land reform," including urbanization, environmental constraints and the impact of HIV/AIDS.

Offering an anthropological perspective, this volume explores the changing relations between law and governance, examining how changes in the structure of governance affect the relative social significance of law within situations of legal pluralism. The authors argue that there has been a re-regulation rather than a de-regulation, propagated by a plurality of regulative authorities and this re-regulation is accompanied by an increasing ideological dominance of rights talk and juridification of conflict. Drawing on insights into such processes, this volume explores the extent to which law is used both as a constitutive legitimation of governance and as the medium through which governance processes take place. Highlighting some of the paradoxes and the unintended consequences of these regulating processes and the ensuing dynamics, Rules of Law and Laws of Ruling will be a valuable resource for researchers and students working in the areas of legal anthropology and governance.

Why are certain responses to past human rights violations considered instances of transitional justice while others are disregarded? This study interrogates the history of the discourse and practice of the field to answer that question. Zunino argues that a number of characteristics inherited as transitional justice emerged as a discourse in the 1980s and 1990s have shaped which practices of the present and the past are now regarded as valid responses to past human rights violations. He traces these influential characteristics from Argentina's transition to democracy in 1983, the end of communism in Eastern Europe, the development of international criminal justice, and the South African truth commission of 1995. Through an analysis of the post-World War II period, the decolonisation process and the Cold War, Zunino identifies a series of episodes and mechanisms omitted from the history of transitional justice because they did not conform to its accepted characteristics.